Splash
by Driftwood Ships and Monuments
Summary: Thiel hated the familiarity. Warning: Character-death.


**Reread Bitterblue about a month ago or so, and realized ****there were barley any Thiel fan fictions, so I'm here to change that :)**

**Warning: I don't own the Seven (though its technically Nine) Kingdoms Trilogy–and my idea of Leck's hospital may be very different from yours so...enjoy it if you can? *shrugs***

* * *

He hated the familiarity.

He hated–just the pure fact as he ghosted down the next-to black hallway after hallway like a specter–that he knew every single horrid detail of Leck's hospital. Even without the crude lump of wax he substituted as a candle to light his way, Thiel was sure he wouldn't have needed it anyway.

He hated the familiarity.

No–he hated the memories.

He hated the cracks and crevices in the yellow and dust-stained arched entryway that flickered in and out of his vision into darkness depending on the way he turned his lantern.

It was here, this very archway, where Theil had done the most unimaginable–and deeper still where he had done even an more uncountable horrors. It was here, that he had assaulted little girls, felt the nauseating reverberating pleasure of their too-innocent pain. Where he had cut and gouged at peoples skin; cut their arms and slit their eyes.

Thiel hated the familiarity.

For it was all too clear, and it had been too clear then: the pleasure of his own hands, wet with the blood of wounds he had inflicted on too many times onto too many people, sneaking up the tiny bodice of the too young girl too young to have even left the comforting sides of their mothers, let alone experience the things her undeveloped body had been forced to experience, mismatched eyes bright with terror. But Thiel had done it anyway–and it had only taken three words from a man Graced with telling lies people believed.

_'Make her pay..'_

Thiel hated the memories.

No–he hated the truth.

He hated the nostalgia, which was always an aftereffect of being touched by King Leck's Grace, that would pierce him as he wandered further down the hall and into his 'hospital'. It was here, here where the beds were. Row after devastating row of each flimsy, dusty skeleton of a bed frame stood, each stacked with pile after pile of thin, crass mattress. Next to each bed frame and mattress, were sorts of bedside tables–or just simple cabinets–each holding trays decorated with an assortment of different knifes, scapulas, and a great other rearrangement of funny little tools one would actually most often see in a real-life hospital.

Thiel knew every single name of every single instrument, and kept telling himself King Leck had been peculiar that way.

He hated the truth.

No, he hated the relief.

He hated the feeling of empty, hopeless relief as he wove his way deeper into the massive room of Leck's hospital. The empty, hopeless relief King Leck had forced him to feel. The kind of relief someone would feel after treating an old friend after a great battle; the relief to know that both you and that friend were still alive. Or the relief someone would feel after narrowly missing a big outbreak of some-sort; and the relief to know you had survived.

Thiel hated this relief.

But it was still that relief that welcomed him with open and widely comforting arms, still those arms that secretly had knifes strapped to their forearms that they would still stab him in the stomach with, no matter his approach.

It was still those stabs, those knifes wedged into the back of his skull, his ribs, and heart–the stabs of familiarity, memories, truth, and relief–that brought him over the very tip of the edge later. When instead of inside the damp, musty, catacombs of Leck's maze and hospital Thiel was dangling atop the most highest bridge of all Monsea, finally ready to make his final retreating decent into the black waters below, where he wouldn't have to feel the stabbing, and the familiarity, and the memories, truths, and reliefs...ever again.

He would have succeeded the ending in his life sooner, if it hadn't been for the Queen. The Queen who had tried so bravely to uncover the truths hidden behind all the tapestries, and the embroidery, and the ciphers, and the keys and the fires. The Queen whose kingdom he had ruined.

But in the end Thiel knew he had–in truth–never succeeded in taking away the pain, because he knew even after death, he would remember he had broken the thing he had loved most of all's heart that day–and Thiel–above all else.

Thiel.

Hated.

Himself.

_Splash. _


End file.
